Quote from: flyingmice;376552Possibly the part about me remembering - I'm old as dirt, and old people have fallible memories. OTOH, I don't recall those as the "good old days" at all.

Same here.  My early experiences consisted of a series of dictatorial DMs, until I decided to try DMing myself.

Quote from: flyingmice;376552My gaming is *far* better today than it ever was back then. It wasn't even in the same league. I have never been a person particularly afflicted with nostalgia. My games, gamers, GMing, and group dynamics are all off the charts compared to back then.

My first attempts at DM'ing were somewhat lackluster, though I got better at it as time went on.

I suppose any "nostalgia" I have for older editions of D&D/AD&D, may very well be "brain damage" of my early life experiences.  Possibly similar to reasons I still listen to music from that same time period, even though most of it was admittedly crap.  Somehow my brain is better at remembering stuff from that time period, than anything after or before.

Your reaction doesn't surprise me at all. Think about it. Just how flexible are roleplaying games? While not infinite the combination of elements that make up an RPGs can be use to create a huge variety of situations and scenarios. Like the tools of novel writing, theater, and film can be used to tell all kinds of stories.

From where I am standing it natural for two people using the same rules to wind up with difference experiences depending on location, their group, etc, etc.

I know for me the Old School Primer was helpful in reminding me how I dealt with the issues of AD&D which after years of playing Fantasy Hero, Harnmaster, and GURPS. That the biggest difference between me now and me then is that I have 30 years worth of life experience on which to make rulings. So the second time around is considerably easier.

I still don't particularly care for the class level system but the lower power levels of Swords & Wizardry/OD&D vs AD&D has left me pretty satisfied. Plus there is the upside of using all my old modules and plenty of new stuff as is without the conversions I used to do for GURPS.

At some point I may give Runequest/BRP a try to see how that is.

I know what you can get out of these observation but I hope it helps.

Quote from: flyingmice;376548What I'm seeing here so far is that any effort at determining what is OS *or* NS is very much idiosyncratic and fairly arbitrary. Nailing jello to the wall in Elliot's colorful term. In other words, I'm getting a lot of "OS|NS is very like a snake" responses, which leads me to suspect the blind men are possibly noting different aspects of the same thing. That, coupled with the fact that my own memories of gaming at the time do not line up at all with what OS was supposed to be like, outside of a willingness to improvise rules-wise, leaves me very confused.

Quote from: ggroy;376554Same here.  My early experiences consisted of a series of dictatorial DMs, until I decided to try DMing myself.

I started as a GM so I have no-one to blame but myself.

QuoteI suppose any "nostalgia" I have for older editions of D&D/AD&D, may very well be "brain damage" of my early life experiences.  Possibly similar to reasons I still listen to music from that same time period, even though most of it was admittedly crap.  Somehow my brain is better at remembering stuff from that time period, than anything after or before.

Not for me. I like current music better than my son does, and he's 23. He's currently hung up on classic rock, and I'm not.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;376558Not for me. I like current music better than my son does, and he's 23. He's currently hung up on classic rock, and I'm not.

-clash

One sign of an agile, evolving mind.

What did I download this week?  Some Glenn Miller (not kidding), Seabound, and Ade Fenton.  New Horizons....

Quote from: flyingmice;376558Not for me. I like current music better than my son does, and he's 23. He's currently hung up on classic rock, and I'm not.

You and your son's brains, are probably wired quite differently than mine.  

I haven't listened to much if any new or current music, since the early 1990's.  I couldn't tell you want happened after grunge.  That's how much out of the loop I've been, when it comes to music.

As far as I'm concerned, "nostalgia" is a minor to medium annoyance that plays tricks on my brain.  I try not to think too much about it, though it's not always that easy.

Point of order: I didn't come up with the jello metaphor.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;376568Point of order: I didn't come up with the jello metaphor.

Dang! You're right! It was Jeff! Stupid old brain!

-clash

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;376458I think the idea of this thread is: draw the line however you like, then pick some stuff on the "new school" side, and talk about what it does well.

Don't just draw the line, and don't just list names.

That I can play with!

I started gaming in the ides of 1992, with Basic D&D (black box with big red dragon vs. lone axe-swinging guy on the cover, Zanzer Tem dungeon solo adventure inside). In short order, I picked up the D&D Rules Cyclopedia (which, as you can see, I'm still very fond of), and I was introduced to AD&D 2e (which a bunch of older kids assured me was "vastly superior" to my own RC, between hours-long arguments on the finer points of Dragonlance and Forgotten realms trivia), GURPS 2e (which I was, in turn, assured was also "superior" to any version of D&D, ever), MERP, Rolemaster, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars (D6), Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP), DC Heroes (MEGS) and Rifts. Shortly after that, Vampire: the Masquerade got translated, and the old World of Darkness took over the local gaming scene by storm. We picked up all sorts of wonky Vampire: the Masquerade 1e books, like A World of Darkness 1e and the Diablerie series.

So this may come as a shock to some, but I consider all of the above "old school" (including the 1e WoD books) in that most of them contained elements that several later games tend to de-emphasize.

So what's my definition of new school? The cop-out answer would be to say that anything not old school is new school, but in this I leave out several books I consider "transitional" like AD&D "2.5e" and the Player's Option books, or (horror of horrors!) Vampire: the Masquerade 2e.

The question persists and I have no straight answer, but here's some stuff I typically associate with "new school":

• Character Optimization, and Rewarding System Mastery. It's one thing for a game (like GURPS or Rolemaster) to have fiddly character creation, which is prone to abuse (I fondly remember "Master-Blaster", two players who created a giant, dumb warrior with ST 20, ridiculously low IQ and a bunch of mental Disadvantages, who was a bodyguard to the ST 4, IQ 20, albino, dwarf, hunchback wizard). But "CharOp" to me conjures the image of carefully planning a pathway to power (which is hardly as obvious as ST 20 ands a couple of Advantages) even as you create your character. Games like D&D 3.5e and Exalted are the ones I most associate this with. In fact, not only is this a major feature (and to some, a selling point) of both games, but also something of an expectation that you will optimize your character. It's not unusual to see someone complain at a D&D 4e forum, that the Defender is "not doing his job" because he's not "optimized" for it.
  
  
• Balance Fetish. The expectation that every PC should contribue equally to the party's success was present at our table, but we just thought that it was the GM's job. There should be traps and an ambush for the Thief to shine, or an electronic intrusion is necessary to justify bringing along the Decker. Lately I've seen some games trying to hard-wire this directive into the rules, a tricky proposition at least.
  
  
• Strong Adherence to Rules As Written. What happened to houserules? Granted, they were never big in the local scene. And yet I've always houseruled my games (again, admittedly with mixed results, trial and error and all that).
  
  
• Shared Narrative Control. The idea that the GM should not be the only one doing the narration, and/or that players' input needs not end at their characters' actions and words.
  
  
• Gaming The Story. The idea that "intangible" properties of the story ("soft facts" as opposed to "hard facts") can be fashioned into game elements, typically applied to enhance genre emulation. Call of Cthulhu probably pioneered the concept with the "soft" Sanity stat. Vampire: the Masquerade, for all of its fanfare, didn't do much more, and "hard" stats like Strength or Manipulation were still, for the most part, more important than the "soft" ones of Willpower and Humanity. Sorcerer was the first game I read that really took this concept and went all the way with it, making intangibles ubiquitous and even more important than "hard facts" in game play. The finest example I can think of is FATE 3.0, in which "soft facts" (Aspects) which measure "the way the story should turn out" become a story-centric resource management mini-game of their own.
  

TL;DR. Old school is whatever I was playing before 1997. New school are all those games with their fancy character optimization, rewarding system mastery, fetish for balance, strong adherence to RAW, shared narrative control and/or making intangible story elements into gameable resources. Yes, I'm lumping a lot of incoherent stuff together.

I'm sure I'm not making any sense here but here it is.

Quote from: Peregrin;376454I think this is one of those cases where everything is relative to the observer.

I agree.

It's possible to pinpoint a rough "old school" area of games and times, because some people using the label will agree roughly on these sorts of things, but any sort of scrutiny will show many differing opinions as it concerns its (rather large) edges (is RuneQuest "old school"? Is AD&D2 "old school"? And so on so forth).

For me, in particular, "old school" is like porn: I know it when I see it.

The difficulty then, as far as "new school" is concerned, is that very few people actually use it as a denominator for games or gaming. So we end up with very few elements to actually try to understand what this "new school" would and would not be.

Quote from: The Butcher;376575

• Strong Adherence to Rules As Written. What happened to houserules? Granted, they were never big in the local scene. And yet I've always houseruled my games (again, admittedly with mixed results, trial and error and all that).
  .

This .

In the olden days you were encouraged to make shit up. Now you are encouraged to follow the Designers intentions and deviation will result in you playing a different game and making a mess of it.

Interestingly though you get this from old school gamers who encourage you to play old games RAW which is odd cos in my experience hardly anyone did that in the olden days.

I think this partly comes from the creation of the professional designer. Where as the old designers were just people that make shit up and had access to some publishing mechanism the new designers are seen as skilled experts. I think this is in part due to the democratization of publishing via the Internet leading to a need to differentiate the mass of crap from the professionally published stuff. Which itself stems from a capitalist concept that means branded goods are better than non-branded [back when we bought soap flakes from the grocer by the cup and took it home in a paper bag to buying Ultra-Daz in an environmentaly recycled box for 8 time the price ].

We started playing S&W in my group when someone pitched it to us, saying it would be old school swords and sorcery.

Unfortunately, none of us had played it back in the day, and we had very different ideas of what those terms meant.

He meant a megadungeon.  Myself and another player, both of whom had played in the early '80s though not the '70s had never heard of such a thing.  We assumed the dungeon we went into was something for that week or a couple of weeks, the GM wondered why we seemed almost immediately to expect to move on.

Classic miscommunication.  The other player who'd played a bit before suggested rotating the GM chair, which I thought was a great idea because to me old school was lots of loosely connected adventures with an S&S vibe and we used to rotate DM all the time back when I started out playing D&D.  The original GM felt his idea had been hijacked, which in fairness it had but not remotely intentionally.

That's the thing, back in the day people played lots of ways.  It doesn't surprise me that plenty of real old schoolers don't recognise the old school.  After all, we only made it up recently.

Quote from: jeff37923;376463This is going to be like nailing Jell-O to a wall.

That rocks New one to me, and I'm going to shamelessly steal it and tell everyone I thought of it. Everyone look away...

Quote from: Settembrini;376519From a structuralistic perspective, anything outside the dungeon or a hex map is new school.

Even though the statement seems a bit extreme, I think there's something to it, in the sense that it is what people refer to as "sandbox game play" as one characteristic of old school gaming. The notion that you have a locale or area, and the PCs are basically unleashed there, without any script or preconceptions as to "stories" or "plots". These things emerge from actual play, as the exploration occurs.

This ties into what Dan was saying:

Quote from: One Horse Town;376523I think it's less about a time period and more about mechanics and mindset.

I would say that unified mechanics is the demarkation point between old school and new school. That and less of a focus on DIY and more of a focus on BIY (buy it yourself).

Set's remarks are bound to the "DIY more than BIY" remark here. You build sandboxes and hex maps, you DIY. You have a problem with your game system? You DIY. You're not waiting for the next errata or supplement to fix it for you.

If there's a characteristic of New School, imo, this is it: the reliance on the supplements and errata to fix perceived faulty design in the game. The game provides you with rules, and if rules are missing in some situations, then something's wrong with the game (which is why complaining that 4e doesn't have role playing rules is a tad disingenuous, IMO - if anything, scripting personalities traits and having extensive mechanics revolving around these traits could qualify as "new school". You sure have alignments in OD&D and Sanity in CoC, but the actual ways to roleplay these elements is up for grabs, i.e. adjudication and interpretation, whereas a trait like say Humanity in Vampire has a whole system revolving around it and pretty clear guidelines as to what it means in terms of rules to have Humanity 7, say).

If there's a loophole, the game's at fault. If the GM has to adjudicate, then it's "GM fiat", and "GM fiat" is badwrongfun. Making stuff up is bad, that means the game the publisher sold you is "not finished".

Another characteristic of "not old school" is the belief that you always have to have meaningful mechanical choices to differenciate your character from others. The game is the rules. The rules are the game. If there's no way to differenciate your construct from another that is hardcoded in the game rules, then these things are the same and can't possibly play differently in the game as it occurs.

I'm sure there's more to it. Just a few ideas.

One positive aspect to the "not old school" belief that you have to have extensive rules sets covering most if not all possible interactions in the game, is that, given the number of publishers, there's a lot more work for them to do in order to differenciate their game systems from the competitor's.

So statistically, you're bound, as an old-schooler, to find some idea, somewhere, in a "not old school game", that is worth stealing for your old school gaming.

What might mitigate this positive is that many "not old school games" have integrated mechanics, where it might be more complex to just cut-and-paste some interesting bit without having to import a whole bunch of mechanics you don't really want in order for that bit to work in your game as you want it to. It's not a generality, though.

I'm just going to say WFRP 3 and be done with it.  I don't think it can get much more new school then that.